The Two Row Wampum Treaty, also known as Guswenta or Kaswentha and as the Tawagonshi Agreement of 1613 or the Tawagonshi Treaty, is a mutual treaty agreement made in 1613 between representatives of the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois) and representatives of the Dutch government in what is now upstate New York. The agreement is considered by the Haudenosaunee to be the basis of all of their subsequent treaties with European and North American colonial governments, including the Covenant Chain treaty with the British in 1677 and the Treaty of Canandaigua with the United States in 1794.
The treaty is spiritually and culturally revered and widely accepted among the Indigenous peoples in the relevant territories, and documented by wampum belts and oral tradition. However, in more recent years the authenticity of the later, written versions of the agreement have been a source of debate, with some scholarly sources maintaining that a treaty between the Dutch and the Mohawk nations did not take place or took place at a later date. In August 2013, the Journal of Early American History published a special issue dedicated to exploring the Two Row Tradition.
Background At the start of the 17th century, the Haudenosaunee Mohawk and the Mahican territory abutted in what is now known as the mid-Hudson Valley. Soon after Henry Hudson's 1609 exploration of what is now known as the Hudson River and its estuary, traders from the United Provinces of the Netherlands set up factorijs (trading posts) to engage in the fur trade, exploiting for extractive purposes the trade networks that had existed for millennia. The Dutch traded with the indigenous populations to supply fur pelts particularly from beaver, which were abundant in the region. By 1614, the New Netherland Company was established and Fort Nassau was built, setting the stage for the development of the colony of New Netherland.
Kaswentha In the Haudenosaunee languages, kaswentha (, , )Dyck, Carrie, Froman, Frances, Keye, Alfred & Keye, Lottie. 2024. A grammar and dictionary of Gayogo̱hó:nǫˀ (Cayuga). (Studies of Amerindian Linguistics). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10473483. is the word for a wampum belt.
According to Jon Parmenter:Jon Parmenter (2013). "The Meaning of Kaswentha and the Two Row Wampum Belt in Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) History: Can Indigenous Oral Tradition be Reconciled with the Documentary Record?". Journal of Early American History 3, 82–109, at p. 83–84. http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/18770703-00301005. Kaswentha may best be understood as a Haudenosaunee term embodying the ongoing negotiation of their relationship to European colonizers and their descendants; the underlying concept of kaswentha emphasizes the distinct identity of the two peoples and a mutual engagement to coexist in peace without interference in the affairs of the other. The Two Row Belt, as it is commonly known, depicts the kaswentha relationship in visual form via a long beaded belt of white wampum with two parallel lines of purple wampum along its length – the lines symbolizing a separate-but-equal relationship between two entities based on mutual benefit and mutual respect for each party’s inherent freedom of movement – neither side may attempt to "steer" the vessel of the other as it travels along its own, self-determined path. A nineteenth-century French dictionary of the Mohawk language defined the very word for wampum belt (kahionni) as a human-made symbol emulating a river, due in part to its linear form and in part to the way in which its constituent shell beads resemble ripples and waves. Just as a navigable water course facilitates mutual relations between nations, thus does kahionni, "the river formed by the hand of man", serve as a sign of "alliance, concord, and friendship" that links "divergent spirits" and provides a "bond between hearts".
The treaty "Contemporary Haudenosaunee oral tradition identifies the original elaboration of kaswentha relations between Haudenosaunee nations and Europeans with a circa 1613 agreement negotiated between Mohawks and a Dutch trader named Jacob Eelckens at Tawagonshi, as a precursor to the formal establishment of Dutch Fort Nassau at nearby Normans Kill."Parmenter (2013). "The Meaning of Kaswentha", p. 84. According to Parmenter, "Dating of the original agreement prior to circa 1620 finds support in [a] 1701 recitation, in which Haudenosaunee delegates described their original agreement with the Dutch occurring 'above eighty years' prior to that date, and in 1744 Onondaga headman Canasatego dated the origin of the relationship to "above One Hundred Years Ago'."Parmenter (2013). "The Meaning of Kaswentha", p. 89.
Parmenter has investigated the extent to which Haudenosaunee oral tradition is corroborated by surviving documentary (written) records and found that "the documentary evidence, considered in the aggregate, reveals a striking degree of consistency over time in the expression of fundamental principles of the kaswentha tradition by Haudenosaunee speakers", with "the fullest single written source that corroborates the early seventeenth-century origins of a kaswentha relationship between Haudenosaunee nations and the Dutch appear[ing] in [...] 1689".Parmenter (2013). "The Meaning of Kaswentha", pp. 88–89. And the earliest record of Haudenosaunee speakers explicitly mentioning or reciting the kaswentha tradition before Anglo-American and French colonial audiences dates to more than 30 years before this, in 1656 (43 years after the putative origin of the treaty in 1613).Parmenter (2013). "The Meaning of Kaswentha", p. 88.
While the evidence that the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch entered into some kind of political or economic agreement in the early seventeenth century is overwhelming, some historians have found reasons to be cautious about assuming the nature of that agreement was formal and treaty-like. The Dutch were conniving and duplicitous with an endgame of trying to displace the Natives, and rarely upheld any agreements whether they were official or not. The Dutch, for example, may not have recognized their agreement with the Haudenosaunee as a "treaty" in the way that Haudenosaunee tradition remembers it, and may instead have seen their agreement as something less official and more perfunctorily. Mark Meuwese has examined the history of Dutch-Indigenous relations in Africa and Brazil and found that, before 1621, "Dutch traders did not conclude treaties with Native peoples in the Atlantic world. Various agreements and alliances were made, but these took place only when specific factors were involved — the threat of Iberian intervention and the presence of centralized political orders among Indigenous peoples, factors that were not present in North America."Mark Meuwese (2013), "The States General and the Stadholder: Dutch Diplomatic Practices in the Atlantic World before the West India Company Author", Journal of Early American History 3(1), 43–58; quotation from Paul Otto and Jaap Jacobs (2013), "Introduction: Historians and the public debate about the past", Journal of Early American History 3(1), 1–8, at p. 5. Retrieved from http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/18770703-00301006 Similarly, examining Dutch language sources pertaining to early Dutch trade voyages to the Hudson River and other areas in the mid-Atlantic region, Jaap Jacobs finds that "Dutch traders would have had no need to make a treaty with local Indian groups on behalf of the Dutch nation and there is no indication that they did so. On the other hand, there is good reason to believe that Dutch traders and local Native people would have made some sort of agreement as indicated by the Dutch building of the Fort Nassau on native lands and the Kleyntjen affair."Jaap Jacobs (2013), "Early Dutch Explorations in North America, Journal of Early American History 3(1), 59–81; quotation from Otto and Jacobs (2013), "Introduction", p. 5. Jacobs concludes (along with Paul Otto) thatOtto and Jacobs (2013), "Introduction", p. 6. whatever agreements or negotiations traders such as Jacob Eelkens and Hendrick Christiansen may have made with Native peoples, these could not be construed, at least in European terms, as diplomatic treaties between sovereign nations. [... This] does not, however, discredit the tradition of an agreement between Dutch and Haudenosaunee representatives that would later became the basis for Anglo-British and then American negotiations with the Haudenosaunee. The historical context does make it unlikely, at best, that such an event happened in the 1610s. The claim that 2013 is the four-hundredth anniversary of a first covenant is therefore not corroborated by historical research. However, after the 1621 establishment of the West India Company and particularly after the end of the Mohawk-Mahican War four years later, the context for such an enduring agreement is far more probable.
Nevertheless, Haudenosaunee tradition records not only the existence of a treaty, but its specific meaning, in the form of a Haudenosaunee reply to the initial Dutch treaty proposal:You say that you are our Father and I am your Son. We say 'We will not be like Father and Son, but like Brothers.' This wampum belt confirms our words. [...] Neither of us will make compulsory laws or interfere in the internal affairs of the other. Neither of us will try to steer the other's vessel.
The treaty is considered by Haudenosaunee people to still be in effect. The Haudenosaunee tradition states:As long as the Sun shines upon this Earth, that is how long our Agreement will stand; Second, as long as the Water still flows; and Third, as long as the Grass Grows Green at a certain time of the year. Now we have Symbolized this Agreement and it shall be binding forever as long as Mother Earth is still in motion.
The Wampum Belt(s)
Wampum belts of the two-row style are merely one of many methods of representing in physical form the diplomatic and economic agreements implicit in the kaswentha relationship.
There is clear evidence of Haudenosaunee use of wampum for diplomatic functions during the pre-contact period,Parmenter (2013). "The Meaning of Kaswentha", p. 92 with n. 19. while the post-contact period saw "increasing significance of wampum as a material form to facilitate communication across cultural boundaries".Parmenter (2013). "The Meaning of Kaswentha", p. 93. Early evidence for wampum in the region indicates that the dominant style was a relatively simple, monochrome design, often with discoidal beads strung together (rather than tubular beads woven together). Historians debate whether or not the technology required to construct the sophisticated two-row style wampum belt (including, most importantly, tubular purple beads) was available to communities in the region prior to 1613;Parmenter (2013). "The Meaning of Kaswentha", p. 92. however, Parmenter indicates that archeological evidence does not rule out the possibility that two-row wampum belts may have featured in the initial treaty negotiations between the Dutch and the Haudenosaunee.Parmenter (2013). "The Meaning of Kaswentha", pp. 92–93.